German hospital groups launch new quality initiative

The “quality medicine initiative” aims at ensuring and improving the quality of diagnostics and therapy. It was launched today by six German hospitals and hospital groups and will be supported by the physicians' association of Berlin.

German hospitals launch new quality initiative. (Helios).
German hospitals launch new quality initiative. (Helios).

The “quality medicine initiative” (Initiative Qualitätsmedizin - IQM) was launched today by six hospitals and hospital groups, namely Helios Kliniken, university hospital Carl Gustav Carus university hospital Dresden, Malteser and Johanniter GmbH and Unfallkrankenhaus (trauma center) Berlin. The Ärztekammer, the physicians’ association of Berlin, will support the project.

IQM aims at ensuring and improving the quality of diagnostics and therapy. “This is the first inter-institutional quality assurance initiative in Germany”, the project leaders announced. IQM is designed to provide the public with meaningful and valid data on the actual quality of medical care. The results are based on the analysis of reimbursement data and are thus more transparent and more meaningful than the legally required minimum standard.

“Routine data are the alpha and omega of medical quality insurance. They can be used to unambiguously present positive and negative outcomes and they offer important indicators for medical care research,” Peter Scriba points out, former director of the university hospital Munich and one of the scientific initiators of IQM.

The participants of the initiative agreed to apply three basic principles in their altogether 100 hospitals where approx. one million patients are treated each year: quality measurement on the basis of routine date, publication of the results on a inter-organisational platform and a peer review, where external peers such as other physicians investigate treatment processes with suspicious outcomes. The peer review is planned to be conducted in cooperation with the Ärztekammer Berlin.

08.09.2008

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